“... number of ‘leaks’ that had been traced to them, by the same constraints that their gentlemanly masters had always accepted instinctively. It has not invariably worked. Non-gentlemen still cannot be trusted. Most secret service whistleblowers, for example, have been grammar school oiks, like Peter Wright (Bishop’s Stortford High School) and, more ...”

“... Humiliation if they confessed they had not read Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. As his translator John Hoole put it in 1763, ‘Of all Authors, so familiarly known by name to the generality of English readers as Tasso, perhaps there is none whose works have been so little read.’ Hoole did much to change that: his translation – staid, Drydenical, but ...”

“... boat. This time, however, it was not the thought of pretty girls that diverted him but his friend John Evelyn’s ‘pretty’ new book ‘against Solitude’. Evelyn’s Publick employment and an active life prefer’d to solitude, published in 1667, was written to refute Sir George Mackenzie’s 1665 work, A Moral Essay, Preferring Solitude to Public ...”

“... Western allies remains to be seen. There has been extensive damage already. The Saudis are past masters in destroying places of importance to early Islamic history. The royal family’s adherence to the sectarian Wahhabi doctrine led them to order the destruction of the tombs of Muhammad’s family and some of his closest followers in Medina.The importance ...”

“... not. His praise of Swift’s writings, and his sense of Swift as one of his own great literary masters, along with (and perhaps surpassing) Aristophanes, Lucian, Rabelais and Cervantes, was strong. In return, Swift is said to have admired Fielding’s wit and to have confessed that one of the only two occasions in his life when he remembered having laughed ...”

“... and a chaplet round his helm. Beside him his wife with a rich head-dress. A noble tomb. His son John was also many times MP. As Sir William sat as fellow MP for Oxford with Thomas Chaucer, I was naturally on familiar terms with him and startled even Rowse by giving his alabaster cheek a great smacking kiss. To the north of the north aisle of the short nave ...”

“... There is something off-key about all these jewels and feathers, braid and enamel and gold. When John Singer Sargent’s tremendous portrait of the colonial administrator Sir Frank Swettenham inspired Rebecca West to comment that ‘he looked as if he wasn’t quite a gentleman,’ was she showing her sensitivity to the excess of his display? To the ...”

“... five days into two separate congresses, because it proved impossible to bridge the divide between masters and journeymen.Liberals​ revered parliaments and looked with disgust on the clubs and assemblies of the radicals which seemed to them to parody the sublime procedural culture of properly elected and constituted chambers. Even more alarming, from the ...”

“... Middlemarch, this ‘line of work is very deep indeed’.Few are better suited to this work than John Guillory, the deep man’s deep man. His Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, published in 1993, is one of the most admired and influential studies in the humanities in recent decades. The hallmark of his work has been to engage ...”

“... to put it another way, is about as far from ‘About suffering they were never wrong,/The Old Masters’ as poetry can get, though the poem’s subject is roughly the same as Auden’s. And the tone is only achievable if one writes out the Altichiero – the knightly and metaphysical – in one’s makeup. Sometimes the best use of a passion for a painter ...”

“... thoughts against thoughts in groans grind. For too long, Bishop had lived these moral choices of life/death, right/wrong, male/female: but at last, the early happy years with Lota had made them seem irrelevant, and Bishop, longing for Paradise since her blighted childhood, felt she had found it at Santarém: That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther; more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile in that conflux of two great rivers ...”

“... and how by doing so they insert themselves into a canon of works.Although Bloom’s professed masters in The Anxiety of Influence were Nietzsche and Freud, he is probably best regarded as the intellectual child of the great 19th-century American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson and his admirer the poet Walt Whitman. Bloom inherited rhetorical tics from ...”

“... on the same continents – Latin America and Europe – and pay ambiguous homage to the same masters: Castro and Mitterrand, the real ‘lords’ of volume two, overshadowing both Allende and Che, who are also discussed at length. Les Masques is the more personal book, with plentiful detail about Debray’s journeys, his states of mind, his time in ...”

“... and she liked him as a man’. Now she oversaw the poet’s legacy with canniness and care. When John MacBride, Maud Gonne’s estranged husband, was executed after the 1916 Rising in Dublin, Yeats talked once more of marriage to Maud Gonne, and then became involved with her daughter Iseult, to whom he also proposed. Joseph Hone writes about this in his ...”

“... came across: much of Hunky Dory consists of pastiches of Bowie’s musical heroes of the 1960s – John Lennon, Syd Barrett, Anthony Newley, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground. Which would make Ziggy Stardust the beautiful butterfly that emerged from the chrysalis. Paul Trynka begins his biography with a description of Bowie’s performance of ‘Starman’ on ...”